Privacy and Truthful Equilibrium Selection for Aggregative Games

Abstract

We study a very general class of games — multi-dimensional aggregative games — which in particular generalize both anonymous games and weighted congestion games. For any such game that is also large , we solve the equilibrium selection problem in a strong sense. In particular, we give an efficient weak mediator : a mechanism which has only the power to listen to reported types and provide non-binding suggested actions, such that (a) it is an asymptotic Nash equilibrium for every player to truthfully report their type to the mediator, and then follow its suggested action; and (b) that when players do so, they end up coordinating on a particular asymptotic pure strategy Nash equilibrium of the induced complete information game. In fact, truthful reporting is an ex-post Nash equilibrium of the mediated game, so our solution applies even in settings of incomplete information, and even when player types are arbitrary or worst-case (i.e. not drawn from a common prior). We achieve this by giving an efficient differentially private algorithm for computing a Nash equilibrium in such games. The rates of convergence to equilibrium in all of our results are inverse polynomial in the number of players n . We also apply our main results to a multi-dimensional market game. Our results can be viewed as giving, for a rich class of games, a more robust version of the Revelation Principle, in that we work with weaker informational assumptions (no common prior), yet provide a stronger solution concept (ex-post Nash versus Bayes Nash equilibrium). In comparison to previous work, our main conceptual contribution is showing that weak mediators are a game theoretic object that exist in a wide variety of games – previously, they were only known to exist in traffic routing games. We also give the first weak mediator that can implement an equilibrium optimizing a linear objective function, rather than implementing a possibly worst-case Nash equilibrium.

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